Location based services are services that require knowledge of and usually provide features relating to the location of something. The objects of interest may be alive or inanimate. For example, location based services may be provided in relation to a vehicle, a nonmoving location (e.g. when a person moves into that location), a person such as a teenager or elder, a pet, or a valuable farm animal. A fleet of trucks may be tracked and nearby features of interest to their drivers, such as the near presence of a refueling station, may be presented to a driver. Another example is informing a person entering an airport that a shop within the airport has a sale. This second example not only illustrates a location based service but the information transferred also has a time component as it may only be sent when a sale is occurring and at a time when the store is open. Some location based services might be presented to anyone at the correct location and time, others may be tailored. For example, a message about a sale at the duty free liquor shop may not be sent to a teetotaler.
Some LBS applications may require frequent or almost continuous tracking of location information about one particular object. Some LBS applications may require processing, sometimes frequent processing, of location information about a large number of objects. If an application provides information based on the objects which are, at a point in time, in some sense near a particular location or other objects, and everything is potentially on the move while this information is being provided, substantial processing power may be needed.
What is needed, then, is a system and associated procedures to provide LBS applications with efficient and scalable location tracking capabilities that allow processing a large number of objects, and/or updates, for location-based services, in a cost-effective manner. These applications may process large scale location updates and both long-standing and one-time spatio-temporal queries in near real time.